Three years ago, I weighed nearly 400 pounds, had high blood pressure, eczema all over my hands, snored so hard sometimes I’d wake up with a headache, and struggled with depression a lot. I was in a situation I did not love. At times, I felt powerless to do anything about it.

I’m not special. For the past few years, I was as impacted as anyone else: COVID hit, some people stopped caring about how they looked, what they ate, how they worked. I did, anyway. In a way, I kinda gave up on myself.

I looked around one day and saw I wasn’t trying to improve. I couldn’t deny it. Dunno what inspired me other than being bored of being unhealthy but I made two lists: things out of my control, things that were not my fault, and another list of things that were my fault, things completely within my control.

Long story short, it’s more than 3 years later and I’m still on a slow but upward-sloping arc of achieving a new level of appreciation and enjoyment of life in general. I’m going to share the whole story here because it was much simpler and easier than I ever imagined. The story might help inspire someone else to break out of whatever they feel might be an obstruction to living their best life.

My friends and loved ones comment on how I look, they praise me for having lost more than 150 pounds or 68 kilograms over the past three-four years. I always tell them, “Thanks! You think the outside looks different? You should see the inside.”

Mental models matter and I’m gonna talk more about that here as time permits.